thoughts

A Montage! I’m All Sewn Up.

October 8, 2007 by krisis

Okay, before I can blog about anything else I need to address the pressing issue of a several-day backlog of interesting links.

Have at them.

I’m sure all of you savvy people have seen these already, but just in case you haven’t, via Debbie Millman: Dove has released two videos that play on the image of female beauty in media – first one that follows a supermodel from first call to final poster, and a second that’s a montage of images of feminine beauty. You could argue (as Kottke did) that Dove’s parent company Unilever is a major offender in the image war, but, regardless of whose on which side of the line, both shorts are fantastic.

Layer Tennis is a volley of increasing oneupmanship conducted in consecutive layers of a design file. Coincidental to my prior topic Debbie Millman explains in more detail. Ages ago Jett was the narrator of a round, but I’m not sure that old-skool layer tennis was organized by the same people as this newfangled one that’s drawing links from everyone and their mommyblogger – partially due to killer narrators like the above mentioned pair of Dovebloggers.

You know all those annoying distorted words you have to transcribe for highly discerning websites to prove you’re not a robot? They’re called captchas. However, you could also use the word “captcha” to describe a word or passage in a scanned book that is not definable by OCR software. Are you sensing some synergy? Well, a team at Carnegie Mellon University did – they’re farming out book captchas for websites to use as entrance captchas, logging all of the user generated solutions. The result? Recaptchas, which crowdsources its way to about 3,000 hours of captcha deciphering per day.

Everyday Goddess wants to break into episodic television directing, but she’s having trouble finding a foothold. The means of production for specific industries like this are all sewn up by the major players, and the entrance requirements are often paradoxical – she’s been told that she should direct an independent feature so that she gets noticed. But she doesn’t want to direct features, she wants to direct TELEVISION. So, if you know someone who knows someone, drop her a line.

DIY internet musician BradSucks is seeking volunteers to record themselves singing along with his new tune, “Out of It.” I’m going to try to find a moment to record myself this weekend.

Quicker hits:

The Rum Bar was nominated by several independent auditors as a location for our next upscale bar crawl.

Which of two famous Roger Fenton photos came first – one of a road without cannonballs, and one with? Errol Morris writes two fantastic NYT articles on the topic – one of journalistic inquiry via research and interviews, and a second featuring more direct investigative journalism. A final part pends. Via K.

I’m not a great fan of crying at work, but this article about a Pittsburgh professor with a limited time to live did the trick.

Three links from the unstoppable juggernaut of posts that is Mashable: WikiInvest is a wiki community for stock junkies. TIOTI is short for “Tape It Off the Internet.” YouTube + Bittorent = Virtual Tivo. Great for non-teevee owners who still enjoy a show or two (i.e. me) . For those trying to kickstart their blogging, 10 Free eBooks for Bloggers.

FriendFeed aids you in stalking your friends across multiple websites with social networking components, including FaceBook, Flickr, Amazon, Netflix, and more. Via Make You Go Hmm.

OCDblog: Meetimer tracks how long you surf each website, helping you manage your time (and decrease your procrastination).

How fantasy football is like business. A lot of people are probably going to use the former to inform the latter, but it’s the other way around for me.

Go behind the scenes building the Great River of China. From the same source: Animal Logic is a unique series of photos documenting the installation of animals into museum exhibits.

No more taking calls behind the wheel for PA drivers.

We know I love all things colorful and retro, so I love this set of color photos from World War II.

The Starburst Cluster in NGC 3603 is my favorite Astronomy photo of the day in weeks.

(fin)

Illuminated Pickups, et cetera

October 3, 2007 by krisis

(1) Elise bought me a gift certificate for a pickup replacement on my primary electric guitar as a birthday gift, which is perfect timing, as Gina and I were already plotting on evolving Arcati Crisis into the electric realm over the course of the next few months.

My guitar is an Epiphone copy of a Gibson 335, and after several years of playing it and digesting online reviews it would seem that the only non-esoteric detail separating my guitar from the equivalent Gibson is the style/tone of the pickups (and also the nut).

My original birthday gift plan was to outfit my guitar exactly like a brand-new 335 – with two Gibson 57 Classic humbuckers. However, at Arcati Crisis’s Tin Angel gig I got into a conversation with our friend Chris about the possibility of buying two different types of pickups so my neck tone is differentiated from bridge.

And, um, I am not quite rock enough to know anything else about this life-altering decision.

I spent a few days researching my various indie-rock heroes, but none of them has a distinct enough setup for me to emulate. Also, I can’t turn up anything on the guitar rig of Garbage ax-slinger Duke Erickson (he being ostensibly the reason I bought this particular guitar in the first place). However, I did locate the eminently informative Guitar Player Gear Guide blog.

Do any of you wonderful people know anything about this? I have to drop my guitar off at the store on Saturday if I have any hope of getting it back before the next Arcati Crisis gig.

(2) I want a WordPress plugin that will insert illustrated initial letters into my posts, both automatically and on-demand. Bonus points if they are illuminated.

I know enough PHP to be a minor threat when it comes to WordPress, but this particular concept is out of my realm because it involves live rejiggering of text as its being called out of the ether of my database.

Anyone?

(3a) After an inexplicable one week delay the new PJ Harvey disc, White Chalk, came out yesterday. It’s been billed as PJ’s piano album, but that only tells a fraction of the story. It’s really more like her indie, piano-based, acoustic, English-Appalachian folk record. Sort of. Full review forthcoming.

(3b) Also inexplicable: Bruce Springsteen‘s lead single (“Radio Nowhere“) is one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard in months, and the production is all tight and sparkly and curiously “Since U Been Gone” sounding.

A quick sample spin through the rest of his newly released Magic yields similar results on at least three others songs, leading me to (for the first time ever) want to buy a Bruce Springsteen CD in a bad way. But, then I’m like, dude, you so do not like Bruce in any way, shape, or form. In my youth he was relegated to my mother’s forbidden trinity of vocal idiosyncrasies – Bruce, Bob, and Neil.

Even having disposed of a few of those systematically programmed prejudices (e.g., I do not ridiculously eschew middle Beatles) I can’t seem to succumb to the Magic of Asbury Park’s favorite son. I even tried paying for a copy with Elise’s credit card to try to alleviate some of the hard-coded guilt, but I couldn’t bring myself to go through with it.

Maybe if i just buy it track by track from iTunes I can avoid any imperative towards self-immolation my mother may have embedded in my unconscious psyche in my infancy through a series of flash cards.

(3c) OMG, I forgot to mention the best part of last week’s happy (six) hour(s): Melon is going to go to the Kelly Clarkson concert with me. Oh yessss.

(End Note) Not only does me + Gina = awesome rock stars, but as of a few minutes ago I completed the first draft of a standard notation transcription of one of our songs, complete with guitar tabs and harmony.

I cannot express to you the undue amount of excitement this is causing me, a major sheet music fetishist.

Sheet music! Of our song! Necessary because we forgot how to play it!

(Or, more accurately, because we recorded it in one night for SongFight, so it never really existed as a song that we could play together in a physical space (though I believe we once attempted it at a Lyndzapalooza).)

Alright, enough chatter.